Access NetSuite Sales Order by External ID

Good afternoon all, I am just wondering if there is an easy way to access a record in NetSuite by URL using the External ID.

The native URL for a NetSuite Sales Order is:

https://XXX.app.netsuite.com/app/accounting/transactions/salesord.nl?id=YYY&whence=

Where:
XXX is the Client/Org ID
YYY is the NetSuite Internal ID

However what I really want is to be able to change that URL to be say:

https://XXX.app.netsuite.com/app/accounting/transactions/salesord.nl?external_id=ZZZ&whence=

I know you can do this via the REST API, but I don't really want to sync all of this data back into our system when they are already linked by this ID. I just want to create a dynamic URL to take people straight into NetSuite.

Surely this should be possible as natively functionality?

Fingers crossed it is!!!

If the person is already logged in to Netsuite then to convert a link containing an external id to an internal link you would use a suitelet.

The suitelet would extract the external id parameter, use the N/search API to find the internal id and then the N/redirect API to forward your user to the actual sales order view.

Note that if the person with the external id link is not logged in to Netsuite you can still return a custom html page of the sales order or return the printed sales order as a PDF

Unfortunately, there is no native way of using the external id in a URL.
The only way should be custom, and a good example is the one from @bknights